It occurred to me that the "clipper chip" makes it easier for the government to tap voice telephone trunks & do traffic analysis. Current long-haul phone technology uses out-of-band signalling on different, reportedly encrypted, trunks, so to make any sense out of the data trunks you also have to listen in on the signalling trunks and correllate what you record there with what you record off the data trunks. With the wiretap chip in place, all they need to do is to "surf" the data trunks looking for the encrypted serial number of the devices they're interested in. Depending on what the encryption tag blocks *really* look like, you might not even need SK in order to do traffic analysis. Even if the tag blocks are built with confounders and similar randomness included to discourage ciphertext matching, the SK can be found in *every single chip* and it's only a matter of time before someone gets it, either by electron microscope or by bribing some of the hundreds of people likely to have access to the key. - Bill